This Guide
Is a compilation of tips, links, info copied from web sites usually with associated links, and my own observations. I started this game Aug 2015 and am still a newbie. Most of the items in this guide are valuable to know as a newbie.

ARK Overview
ARK is an incredible sandbox game that can be played solo or on a multiplayer server. This guide was started as a compilation of links and info for new players. Sept 2015, I’m still a new player. The setting is a large tropical island. You find yourself waking up on the beach in your undies. How did you get there? It’s a mystery. There are no quests, there is a crafting tree that dictates all of your early actions as far as gaining skills. Start out by beating a tree with your fist and get some thatch, make a stone pick. From there it’s all good.

Heads Up
Something you should know about. This game is tough. You are going to die a lot, but there are ways to mitigate this. Solo play is the most flexible, but may be lonely. A non-dedicated server can be set up, but I’ve never tried it and do now know how well it will perform if you invite 10 friends to play. I’m sure it depends on your hardware.

Before you commit to an Official or Private Server, make sure you understand it’s settings. Things like harvest rates and timing times are under control of the Admin. Some servers leave those settings at the default “1.0”, while others have factors accelerate to 3x, 6x, or even 10x.

Why mention this early? Read on. Taming is explained in a following section with more detail, I’d like to advise you of one of the harshest realities of ARK.

At standard settings a low level Dino takes about 15 min, requires, say 5 containers of narcotics and might need upwards of 40 steaks to get it tamed. You may think this sounds excessive, feeding this little dinosaur 40 stakes in 15 minutes? They must be mini-steaks, a bite each. Honestly it may sound silly, but that is not hard to do.

However, you might think I’m kidding when I tell you at standard settings, the length of time to tame a top level dino could be anywhere from 6-10 freaking hours. This is after it’s been knocked out, when you go into drugging and feeding mode allowing it to slowly become tamed. Huh? Yes, its true. It’s one of the most mind boggling game realities I’ve ever run into as why would a developer punish players with this kind of requirement. Fortunately, I think the Devs have recognized this problem and allow server settings to be relaxed at the discretion of the server Admin. As I said in a solo game, you can fix this. And out there in private/unofficial servers, you’ll find some with relaxed settings. I have no idea if there are any relaxed official servers to be found.

Links: See Google Drive Link top an bottom of this article
* ARK Survival Evolved Forums
Gamepedia.com World Map At this link you can create a private map.
ARK Creatures List
ARK Dinosaur List
Crumplecorn.com Taming link:
Engram Tip for Other Solo Players when Playing Locally
Cooking
Weapons
Console Commands

Secondary Controls
*Consol- Tab
*Drop Item- O
*F- Access container or mount inventory
*H- HUD
*Backspace- Hotbar toggle, HUD Toggle!
*I- Inventory
*Map- M Note: if you are in third person view, you may have to zoom in to see anything on the map.
*Place Map Marker- P Note Aug2015: Map does not allow you to set your current point, by simply designating it. It appears that you have to look at the map, type in your lat/long and name it.
*Selfie Cam- Right Alt.
*V- Craft Tables
*Zoom- Mouse Scroll. Zoom in and out of 3rd to 1st person view.
*FPS- type "stat fps" into the console (default "tab").
*Gamma # where # = 1 to 9 example "gamma 3" alters the darkness in the game so you can see at night.(Doesn't work on official servers anymore)

Starting Game
Managing the Size of the ARK Save Folder- Listed prominently in this guide, but can be dealt with later. As time goes by with solo game saves, the Saved Game folder will grow dramatically reaching 2.5GB or more.
Look in the Steam>SteamApps>Common>ARK>ShooterGame>Saved>SavedArkslocal folder. Initially you will notice 5 files in this folder- LocalPlayer.arkprofile, LocalPlayer.profilebak, TheIsland.ark, TheIsland_AntiCorruptionBackup.bak, TheIsland_NewLaunchBackup.bak.
However as time goes by, more TheIsland.ark files will appear with dates attached to them. These extra files are old save files and can be deleted with no adverse effect on your solo game progress as long as you don’t delete TheIsland.ark file! This will substantially reduce the size of the “save” folder.

* How to Have Multiple Single Player Save States
- Listed prominently in this guide but can be dealt with later. Create a folder called something like ARK Backups outside of the Steam App folder.
- to: Steam>Steam Apps>Common>Ark>ShooterGame>Saved
- 5 Folders there: ClientPaintingsCache, Config, LocalProfiles, Logs, SavedArkslocal.
- Do this anyway you want, but as an example create a subfolder, call it Save 1, and copy these two folders to the Backup folder.
- For a fresh start, after backing up as described, delete the contents of those two folders, but keep the folders.
To restore, move the backed up files back into the game directory from where you got them.

* Starting Game- First check out options.

ARK Settings: Make some choices at the start of your solo game. These can be changed any time you start up so don’t sweat standard settings for your first time out.

Difficulty Slider-
Explanation of Local Host / server Settings Slider @Reddit.com
* Max Structure in range: The number of player built things that can be placed within a hard-coded range?
* Day cycle speed: The speed the day & night goes on, the higher the number the faster.
* Day time speed: The speed the day goes on, the higher the number the faster.
* Night time speed: The speed the Night goes on, the higher the number the faster.
* Dino damage: The damage a dino can do. The higher the number the harder a dino can do damage.
* Player damage: The damage a player can do the higher the number the harder a player can do damage.
* Structure damage:The damage a structure can take the lower the number the harder it gets to damage it.
* Player resistance: Basically a damage modifier. If you increase the slider the selected entity type will take more damage. Yes, that's right, it is counter-intuitive but higher numbers mean less resistance...poorly named sliders.
* Dino resistance: See Player Resistance.
* Structure resistance: See Player Resistance
* XP multiplier: The amount of Experience a character gets while gathering experience the higher the number the faster.
* Taming speed: The speed you tame a dino, the higher the number the faster.
* Harvest amount: Amount of resources gained per action.
* Character Water drain: The lower the number the slower a character has to drink water.
* Character food drain: The lower the number the slower a character has to eat.
* Dino character food drain: the Lower the **number the slower a character dino has to heat if you want to tame a dino do not put it on 0 it will not drain its food down.
* Character Stamina drain: The lower the number the slower a character has to recharge their stamina.(run energy)
* Dino Stamina character drain: The lower the number the slower a dino has to recharge their stamina.(run energy)
* Player character health recovery: The higher the number the faster you recover.
* Dino character health recover: the higher the number the faster dino's recover.
* Dino count: The higher the number the more dino's will be on the map.
* Harvest health: Health of trees and rocks. The higher the health, the harder to harvest.
* PvE structure decay period: The length of time a structure remains after its owner logs off. This prevents PVE servers from becoming cluttered with crap from inactive players.
Resources respawn period: ?

Join ARK to join a server or pick Host/Local to play Solo or...
Choose Non-Dedicated Server to invite a friend to play with you. I’m not sure what happens when you play once as solo, switch to non-dedicated server, then back to solo as far as game progress and what you still own. I assume you’ll own everything you had before, but that’s an assumption.

Create Your Character
The South Coast is reportedly the best place for newbies to start. Select this on your Character screen before launching into the action.

OK, I’m on a beautiful Island in my Undies. What do I do now?
Welcome to the brave new world. You wake up on an island in your undies, surrounded by dinosaurs and after briefly scratching at the strange icon on your wrist, you take a look around. Ooh, look at that majestic Brontosaurus! It’s beautiful and then... your world turns green and your dead....Lol. Ok It’s not that bad. Let’s proceed with basics.

If You’ve Played Other MMOs with Dangerous Critters
You’ll note these dinos have no labels that advise of their level or how dangerous they are like a red exclamation point over them. Labels will appear when you are very close to them advising of their name and level, but if they are dangerous, they will be attacking you at that point. Remember you are in a starter zone, so it’s not going to be instant death, but you won’t have to wander far before things get even more dangerous than where you started.

Stay on the beach at first because there you have view range. Bad things can hide obscured by the bushes and rocks.

Have a Drink but don’t swim if you can help it
There likely will be water near by. Resist the temptation to take a dip, unless it’s absolutely necessary. Carnivore type fish called Megapiranha, if they get your scent, will kill you in a couple of chomps. Is it possible to swim across a body of water and not die? It’s a 50-50 proposition. However you can go stand in the water and press E to take a drink. Later you can research and make a waterskin (Level 3) to haul some water with you, but it’s basically one drink and over time it leaks. “E” is your friend!

Harvest Berries
* If you are by bushes, press “E” to harvest berries. As far as I know these are mostly edible. Dont’ eat Narcoberries because they put you to sleep. Berreis will mostly increase your hydration and offer some food value. Note on the Inventory page (I), on the bottom right are your stats including hunger and hydration.
* Collecting- Spam E- walk around hitting E and you’ll grab all sorts of stuff. However, if you are looking for something specific like fiber, you’ll miss a lot of it by running. Stop at a plant and E it until it falls apart to get all it has to give.

Avoid Small Upright Dinos Until You Plan on Taming One
You might turn around and come face to face with a Parasaur. Don’t faint, they are big, like 9’ tall with a ridge on their head, but harmless. But steer clear of any smallish upright dinos, called Dilophosaurs made famous in Jurassic Park, (the Movie), the one that spit on and then ate Dennis Nedry in his jeep. If by chance your world turns green, you got spit on, run like hell (hold the Shift Key) until you get your vision back. It takes about 5 sec to regain vision.

Your Map
Get out the Map (M), you may have to use your mouse scroll button to see what’s on the map. Mark the map as to where you started by selecting (P), eyeball the map and mark your Latitude (up and down) and Longitude (left/right) and give it an easy name. So you’ll have no doubt where your starting point was after your DEAD, lol. The thing to know is that the marker goes where ever you tell it to go, so if you mess up your coodinates, the marker could be anywhere. Later in the game there is a GPS which makes things easier.

The Grim Reaper
Before launching your character, the first order of business if you have not all ready done this is come to terms with the fact that you will die... a lot. When this happens, choose a random respawn location (until later when you get a bed).

If and when you think you may die, get out into the open so if you have stuff want to retrieve, you’ll be able to find your body. Note that after a relatively short period of time, you body disappears and is replaced by a backpack. But that too eventually disappears. If you were running frantically though the bushes when you expired, good luck finding your body. As a rule avoid dying in the water. It can be especially tough finding your body/backpack in the water and when carnivores fish are close by.

Run From The Bugs!
Some of the most lethal and dangerous critters in this game to a low level player are the ants and the dragonflys. They bite and sting. At least you can run from the ants, but it seems that when you slight a dragonfly by appearing around a carcass it has claimed, it and a swarm will chase you for miles. Sure, try to whack it and see how long it takes and if you manage to survive the encounter. If desperate, escape insects by diving under water but stay in the shallows.

Having trained a group of Dilo guard dogs on occasion, I have done well by crouching in my pack and letting them take care of these flying hazards. If you run, you are exposed and your pack won’t nearly be as effective killing them. But I’ve been in situations where I have both ants and dragonflies attacking me simultaneously- very very bad.

Engrams Rule!
There are no quests in ARKO. Virtually everything you do is guided by Engrams which can be accessed on the Inventory Page (I) along with Character info. On the right side of the page Engrams can be selected for learning. Over on the left of this page is an inventory section and a crafting section which if clicked on at the top, shows what Engrams have been learned. Down at the bottom is a hot bar. You can drag weapons here, and Engrams. If you press and hold the mouse button on an Engram in the hotbar, it will show you what you need to make it and what you have or don’t have (green or red).

Make a Tool/Weapon
Make a Stone Pick. This is not intuitive but punch a palm tree until you have gotten 1 stone, 1 wood, and 10 thatch. Run around pressing “E” and you will pick up a stone. Select the Stone Pick Engram in your list of Engrams and research it, or put the Stone Pick Enram into your hot bar and click it to create a pick. if the Engram is in the hot bar, this is not the pick. You have to open inventory and move the pick from Inventory into the hot bar which btw is also an inventory slot.

Once you have a the Pick make a Stone Hatchet. Note that there is a primary resource created by using the pick on boulders, which creates mostly flint and some rock. In contrast the Hatchet used on boulders creates mostly rocks and some flint.

Underwear is sexy but not the best for long term survival
Now you are on your way. You’ll feel really good when you make your first pair of pants! Research clothing, gather fiber from plants along with the berries. Note, clothing and all gear degrades as time goes by. Periodically check your stuff and repair it. Clothng must be unequipped to be repaired.

Give Me Steak!
You can kill Dodos to harvest Meat and Hide. Note the Hatchet will harvest more Hide and the Pick harvests more Meat. Good luck with the Parasaurs and Phiomias. Whack them and they will bolt, but you are strategic and lucky, you’ll get on their opposite side from some large rocks and when hit them, they will bolt and possible get hung up in the rocks. Note: ARK has a lot of pathing issues and animals getting stuck in rocks and trees and even half way in the ground. You can almost plan on it and use that when hunting.

You can eat Raw Meat in a pinch, but it lowers your health by -5 for every piece you eat. This stat is recovered over time. Raw Meat spoils in 10 min. Mostly eat berries until you research a Campfire (L2) The Fire needs both wood and fresh meat to be put in it and it is ignited by pressing “E”. Then relish some Cooked Meat. Note that cooked meat spoils in 20 min, however, for all perishable items, a game mechanic allows one piece of a particular item to spoil at a time. So if you have a stack of 20 cooked steaks, you’ll lose only 1 every 20 min.! Spoiled Meat has value for making narcotics. If you need more spoiled meat faster, separate it into stacks of 1.

Storage and Shelter
Research a Storage Box. Research and build a Thatch Hut, starting with the Thatch Foundation (L2)Note that for many items if you change your mind and demolish something, you may not get the resources back. Hint, a Door Frame is place before the Door is attached and you must be in first person view (mouse scroll) to attach the door.

Fauna, Flora, World Links
Gamepedia.com World Map At this link you can create a private map.
ARK Creatures List
ARK Dinosaur List
Crumplecorn.com Taming link: To calculate taming time. Note, you must take into consideration server setting. Is taming set to 1.0 or 3.0?
Spam E- walk around hitting E and you’ll grab all sorts of stuff. But to get all there is to get out of a plant, stand there and harvest until the plant falls apart.
* How Much Do You need? Put a recipe for in your tool bar and holding the number for that slot down shows how much of each ingredient is needed. After you make the item, open Inventory (I) and drag the actual item to toolbar to use it.
Primary/secondary Harvesting- Axe gets more wood than thatch from a tree, more stone than flint from a rock, more hide from a dino. Pick gets more thatch, more flint, and more meat.
Dino Inventory- To drop, hover over item and press “o”.

* The Gathering Grind
Fibers and Berries - Plants, not trees. Tamed herbivore can be used to harvest berries by left clicking on plant while your riding the beast.
Meat and Hide - Gathered from all dead creatures.
Thatch and Wood - Gathered from trees by punching, pick, hatchet, or some dinos. Punching, picks, and dinos like Trikes and Brontos get more Thatch than Wood. Hatchet and Mammoths get more Wood.
Flint and Stone - Gathered from rocks by pick, hatchet, or some dinos. Get more Flint using picks and dinos like Anklyo. Get more Stone by using the hatchet or picking it up off the ground.
Chitin and Keratin - Chitin is gathered from various creatures like Spiders and Scorpions while Keratin is gathered from others like Carbonemys, Stegos, and Trikes. Using a Hatchet or creature like the Sabertooth will get you more of both.
Metal and Obsidian - Metal from rocks with gold streaks or solid gold, usually found on mountains and in caves. Use a metal pick or Anklyo to get more Metal. Metal makes metal ingots. Obsidian is gathered from smooth black rocks found in the same places and harvested the same as Metal. Obsidian is mainly used in the Fabricator to craft other materials like Polymers.
Silica Pearls and Oil - Pearls are gathered by hand while Oil is gathered most effectively by pick. Both are found underwater, Pearls only at the bottom and in caves, Oil at medium to deep waters and in caves. Pearls are used for crafting things like the Spino Saddle and Electronics. Oil is used to craft some items, used in the preserving bin along with Sparkpowder to turn Cooked Meat into Jerky, or combined with Hide in a Refinery to make Gasoline. Gas in needed to run things like the Electrical Generator and Fabricator.

Plants
*This may change as the game advances, but right now, there is no rhyme or reason to what kind of berries come off of which plants. (Aug 2015)MejoBerry- Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Parasaur, Carbonemys, Phiomia, Brontosaurus, Gigantopithecus
Narcoberry- put you to sleep and make black die with it.
Making Narcotics- When you learn how to make Narcotics, you will not end up with a building engram like you have for items like clothing or weapons. After you build a mortar and pedestal, you’ll find the recipe there in a drug folder. Place the items for the recipe into the Motar, for Narcotics, at a ratio of 5 Narcoberrys per 1 spoiled meat. Double click the recipe folder, the recipe for Narcotics should appear, click or double click that and you will make narcotics!
What do Herbavores like to eat? I tamed a Parasaur and I put in a variety of berries. It ate all the MejoBerrys first!

Using Dinos to harvest berries: All the berry eaters can harvest. When by a plant or tree, Left Click and your beast will harvest. The goods end up in it’s inventory. My understanding is the Trike and Stego are the best. They can fight. Parasaurs, I know when I attack them, they run. Now that I can ride one, I may try to see if it can fight something small.
*Pro Tip: Increasing your harvesters melee damage, increases their yields when they harvest stuff. Higher Melee damage = increased loot

Crafting Building Stuff
Emgrams- Crafting Recipes gained through progression.
Equipment
All equipment degrades over time. Be sure you keep a regular eye on your gear. It would not be smart to start a taming cycle if your slingshot is at 10% health.
Quick Repair- If it breaks, select the number of the item in your toolbar to repair if the required materials are in your inventory.
*Craft tools quickly- after you make it once hold left shift and the number of the item in your toolbar to make again.
Simple Bed- can be renamed through the radial action menu. This will make it easier to sort through multiple beds when selecting a respawn or fast-travel location.
* Hide Sleeping Bag Appears on Map, can be used to mark a location, resource heavy, and can only be used once.
Motar & Pedestal
Mortar & Pestle plus recipes
* Water Skin- Stand in water and hit E key to fill it up. It slowly depletes and as far as I know shows no fill level. Select it in the hotbar to use it.

* Building
First Person View: Some items like doors, chests, beds, require you to be in first person view.
Dino Corral- Level 20 unlocks foundation to place fence.
Upgrading a Building- No need to disassemble a structure. Parts can be upgraded in place by placing new part (wood) over the original thatch part.
Lighten your load by building components in your inventory before you take them home. This makes no sense really, but it works.

Taming/Pets
Transponder Tracker and Node (15July 2015)
Tame an Ape:

Taming Link- @ARK Gamepedia
Heads Up- Already discussed possilbly long taming times at top of guide.

* Beginner Taming In A Nutshell
- When first starting out, taming consists of knocking an animal out with Slingshot ideally, or fists, then feeding it meat (carnavore) or berries (herbavore), and drugging it with narco berries or narcortics, until it’s tame. Hopefully you recognize the danger of trying to whack a carnivore on the nose with your first while it’s trying to kill you.
- Crumplecorn.com Taming link: To calculate taming time and quantities. Note the multiplier to account for server/solo game settings.
- For Berry Eaters That Bolt- The Parasaurs and Phiomias can be maneuvered so when they bolt they get hung up in the rocks so a few more whacks with the slingshot and they will be out.
Animal Inventory: Note, this is not intuitive as a new player, but all animals have an inventory, kind of like a built in backpack. They can carry items there, and they can access food you’ve given them from their inventory. While they are knocked out, they can eat the meat you’ve placed in their inventory automatically. Every so often their head will raise off the ground and they’ll make a little chompy, gulpy sound. If you go check there will be less one meat in their inventory. This is not intuitive either, but feeding them narcotics and drugging them during the taming process is accomplished by placing a bowl of narcotics in their inventory, selecting it (by clicking on it) and choosing “remote use”. (in their inventory). This feeds it to the animal. Review all the steps before you try to tame.

* Taming Steps
- In Advance: Learn the Mortar and Pedestal and Narcotics Engram. Mix up your narcotics. made in the Mortar and Pedestal using spoiled meat and narcoberries at a ratio of 5 berries to 1 spoiled meat.
- Step 1: Locate the animal and knock it out preferably with a slingshot, although my understanding, it’s possible to do so with your fists, (which may be a challenge for a Dilophosaurus that is fighting you).
- Step2: Open the animals inventory (E key), placing Fresh Meat (5 pieces) and 1 Container of Narcotics
- Close the Animal’s Inventory and step back until you see a blue box by the animal. There will be a purple Toper Bar, and a brown Taming Bar. The Taming Bar should go up, the Torper Bar will slowly come down........
- When the toper level drops to 50% add more narcotics. n the animals inventory, select the Narcotics container, and select “remote use” to put this into the animals. syste.

Taming Note 1: For a low level tame, in a pinch you can use the sling shot to whack a stone off their heads to keep their torper up. However this slows the taming process, the resulting damage (more so than using narcotics or narco berries reduces the number of levels they will gain during the tame, and probably won’t work for higher levels without a lot of extra meat. I used the whack method on a L3 Dilo.

Taming Note 2: When out in the world taming while accompanied by tamed dinos, this can present a challenge. The process of taming by knocking down a dino with tranquilizer arrows, is an attack. If the pets with you are in “neutral” or “attack your target” mode, they will attack the animal you want to tame. Your taming target will end up dead, not good!

Unfortunately the only method I’ve seen of controlling this is to put them into passive mode. The caution is that if you must keep track of your tamed dinos. If they are attacked they won’t fight back and will eventually die. Recently I allowed a L100 Trike die in this fashion. Once things got out of my control, I should have returned to me tamed pets immediately and put them on “neutral”.

- Taming Alternative Strategy, Picking Wild Dinos Up- Pteradons can pick up Dilophosauruses and people for transport. Dilophosaurus’s are not that hard to tame so you probably won’t go to the trouble of snagging them with Pteradons. But the Argentavis can pick up Raptors. You’ll find that Raptors are so fast it’s very hard to knock them out while they are attacking you, until you get the higher stun gun. Players will use the Argentavis to go snag a Raptor and drop it into a taming pen, in a safe location. They they can easily drug and tame it. Note: Being able to pick up wild dinos is a server setting. Depending on the server, you may not be able to pick up wild dinos, but I believe in the solo game it’s on by default.

* Dilophosaurus- At standard server settings: Need: Min 34Narco , min 4 fresh meats, and a Slingshot.- Dilophosaurus-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilophosaurus The first good fighter. 6 of these at low levels is a huge help.

* Ride a Dino Make a saddle and put it into the tamed dino’s inventory saddle slot. If you have a founder’s saddle, that is just a skin that can be applied to a Parasaur saddle.
* Gathering Resources while Riding a Dino Herbavores collect things like berries, thatch, or wood. Carnivores gather meat, hides, and other misc items. Whether meat , wood, or berries, they are more efficient at it, than you are. When riding left click on the item or critter you want to attack, if it’s a bush, you’ll collect plant materials.

Taming Videos
Tame a TRex:

Hippo Taming:

Hunting, Fighting Critters
*Diloposaurus- They spit. Drop back zigging and zagging, when they stop and expand their hoods strafe sideways.
*Pack Hunting- If you are low level and hunting with a tamed dino like a Dilo or a pack of Dilos, while the target is being attacked, if you also attack, ideally with a spear or ranged weapon, my experience is that it will turn to face you. If you keep it’s attention, without taking too much damage, your dino{s) will less likely be killed. If the target is a Trike, avoid the horns.
*Torpor- Some creatures will increase your torpor which is represented by a small stars icon above your EXP meter on the right and a purplish border on your screen. If this increases too much you will be knocked unconscious and unable to do anything. Torpor also rises when you attack when out of stamina.
- Where there is one Raptor or Dilo, there most likely are 2 more right behind it.

Maps and Mods
Add an Alternate Map- Log into Steam, ARK, select Steam Workshop. In the category list, pick maps. When you click on a map, a checkmark will appear and will download into your game.
However if you are playing solo games, loading in an alternate map, and creating a new character will alter your Local Player profile, wiping your character progress in the initial map. At least this happened to me.
To prevent this occurrence, BE SURE to backup your Saved Game files in the Saved: SavedArksLocal as follows: LocalPlayer.arkprofile, LocalPlayer.profilebak, TheIsland.ark, TheIsland_AntiCorruptionBackup.bak, and TheIsland_NewLaunchBackup.bak, and store in a save place.

Cheating
I won’t judge you. This is a game, do what’s fun and if that includes shortcuts so be it. Too much effort can be lost and the bottom line this is a game, not some test of manhood. One thing I can’t abide by is not having a backup. This can be accomplished in the solo game. Most of this can’t be done as a player on a server, unless you are an Admin.

Consol Commands
Advanced Game Commands-
How to Have Multiple Single Player Save States- This is not cheating imo. See more in the Starting Game Section.
* Admin Sever Commands
To use the Admin Commands, Logging in as Admin: Hit “tab” key, or whatever you have bound your console key to and type> enablecheats <password>, example = enablecheats 123
* ARK Spectator Command- cheat enablespectator

* Need Something in Particular? Ark.Gamepedia.com Data Values
Open the console with “tab”. To give an item : " admincheat GiveItemNum <item_id> <quantity (1/100)> <quality (0/100)> <blueprint (1/0)> " Example from the link: GiveItemNum 1 1 1 0 will give you Simple Pistol and GiveItemNum 1 1 1 1 will give you blueprint of Simple Pistol. Not sure but for getting the blueprint, I’m thinking that 0= false, and 1= true in the above example.
Give me some drugs man! I don’t care for that description. For the above, you need a space between each number. Try this- to get ten Narcotics, (Item no.123) you type this command into the consol: GiveItemNum 123 10 100 false (explanation: item 123, space, quantity: 10, space, quality: 100, space, type: false)
Now I’ve not done enough experimentation with this so quality may not apply to narcotics and maybe “false” does nothing and it’s the 1 or the 0 that counts as the last part of the command above asking or not asking for an item blueprint.
- Gives Yourself 50 of all Resources> giveresources First enable cheats (above) by logging in as Admin. Press Tab and typ in command giveresources <return>.
This 50 resources command might not be as helpful as you think, it does not include food like narcoberries, it will encumber you, and just maybe I don’t know the full capabilities of how it could work. As I’ve used it, I need to be in front of an empty cabinet or I have to dump a lot of it on the ground before I can move.
- No Item Number use this: Giveitem <blueprint_path> <quantity (1/100)> <quality (0/100)> <blueprint (1/0)
For example to get a metal Railing use this command:
Giveitem "Blueprint'/Game/PrimalEarth/CoreBlueprints/Items/Structures/Metal/PrimalItemStructure_MetalRailing.PrimalItemStructure_MetalRailing'" 1 100 1, where 1= quantity, 100= quality, 1= blueprint yes. No ID item info found at: http://ark.gamepedia.com/Entity_IDs
Give Yoursel BluePrints example for pistol use path from ID page: giveItem "Blueprint'/Game/PrimalEarth/CoreBlueprints/Weapons/PrimalItem_WeaponGun.PrimalItem_WeaponGun'" 1 1 0
Tranq Dart "Blueprint'/Game/PrimalEarth/CoreBlueprints/Weapons/PrimalItemAmmo_TranqDart.PrimalItemAmmo_TranqDart'" 40 1 0 (40 darts)
* Where is the Game User Settings ini file? Used to alter settings in the game. If you are concerned, make a backup copy of this file before altering any settings.
- Find it here: \Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor
Difficulty Offset> Set to 4 for higher level dinos. It should be reflected on the Difficulty Slider- After setting this use the cheat destroywilddinos after you change the setting.
Taming SpeedMultiplier> To speed up taming which for a high level dino at default settings can take 6-10 hrs as has been reported, change the value from 1.000000 to 6.000000 or 10.000000.

Summon a Creature-http://ark.gamepedia.com/Entity_IDs

* Breeding
-https://www.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/3p3i2x/faster_breeding_in_singleplayer/
You can adjust the settings below in the Game.ini file located in
steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor
New Server Game.ini configurable values (copy and paste into game.ini):
[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
MatingIntervalMultiplier=1.0
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=1.0
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=1.0
Info:
MatingIntervalMultiplier (reduce to allow mating more often)
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier (Increase to speed up hatching)
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier (Increase to speed up growth)
Edit: I also have Dino Food Drain turned way down, which may be making my babies eat a lot less as well. All I know is they don't seem to eat much at all.

macrumors demi-god

Some of you who are playing may learn or simply enjoy this tale of woe.

This should be entitled My Ark Disaster. New players or players who don't have much experience with Gigasauruses please take note.

A guildmate is taking a break from ARK. . His base is on an iceberg surrounded by ice. In the process of taking some of his animals, After 5 months of playing, I had the single worst day of my ARK experience and have the dubious distinction of killing two of his top animals, a L90 Mosasaurus and L200 Giga.

It has brought me down, although I'm still playing.

I had a group of 3 Q birds, two were mine, 2 elk, 2 L200 Spinos, and a L200 anklyo, the Mosasaurus and Gigantisaurus. I know what you are thinking, besides that's too many animals to put on follow, I've done it before, never on a raft though, and I am getting ready to dump some pets, and upgrade or would have upgraded if I had not killed some of the new additions.

Always check the agressive stance of your, especially new animals
First I brought the Mosa out of its pen around the other side of the island from where I was departing from. Walked to the base, came back and could not find it. It had died and a very large shark was eating it. I discovered all of the animals were on passive, not a criticism except for myself. I did not even think about that in advance, assuming neutral was the standard setting. And once I got going, I would have put some of them on neutral. But this was still the organizing stage. What could kill your mosey next to the beach? Duh.

If you are not riding it, keep your Giga the Hell away from deep icy water.
After getting over that, I was going to walk the Giga out, over land with the entourage, but My guildmate (with good intentions) suggested I take his raft, put the animals on the raft and have the Q birds and Giga follow so as not to be as likely to get enraged. What a mess that turned into. Again, not criticizing, this is all on me, someone who has been playing this game for 5 months.

About half way across, angling to go around the North coast to my base, I got so jammed up with the birds and Spinos (which are good swimmers) following, and ice, I tried to just get to the mainland, got to something that looked like beach, but was an ice shelf, the Giga was swimming around his head was above the ice. At that point if I had my head on straight, I would have left the animals by/on the ice shelf, jumped on the Giga and ridden him to land, but my excuse is I've taken many animals across water on follow, and never lost any of them... Until last night.

With the raft, I decided to turned back to the ice berg base. Once back, all was accounted for except the Giga. Apparantly Gigasauruses are not great swimmers, can get caught under the ice. This one did and apparantly drowned before I could rescue it. You may know how much I'm kicking myself over this sequence. The game even taunted me, by launching it's dead body out of the water to land on a hill by the base as if to say see what you did you frick'n idiot???

After flagellating myself for several minutes, I picked myself up, flew the Q birds back to base. Returning to the base on a pteradon, I used the raft, to move both Spinos (on follow they climbed on board by themselves), an anklyo, two elks, and the pteradon, around the North coast. Besides being attacked by wolves, where all my animals bailed into the water to counter attack, all went well.

macrumors demi-god

I have no fear of displaying my ignorance of ARK by relaying this story!

…and I want to capture a Q Bird badly in my solo game. If solo, you must either fly next to it on another flying animal, (duh) and jump onto it's back, or carry a scorpion and fly next to it so the scorpion will sting the bird, introducing torpor which will eventually knock it out (after several stings). Fortunately for us players, game mechanics are such that an animal like this can fall from great distances and not die on impact.

After trying about 30 times, even through I've seen this demonstrated several times in videos, I gave up on trying to jump on one's back. Plan B is to try the Argen/Scorpion plan and sting one, but I needed a high level Argentavis, and a highly level Scorpion to make the plan viable and refuse to spawn one with my solo game admin powers. This is the one area where I’ve resisted ‘cheating’ because otherwise would there be any reason to play at all?

​

A high level Argen will have enough stamina so that I don’t have to land every 5 minutes, momentarily breaking off the chase, while carrying a Scorpion set to aggressive, who tends to run off upon landing and kill anything it sees, detaining me from Q Bird pursuit. I later learned, this can be fixed with a Neutral whistle. I’ve only seen high level Argens up in the mountains or at least they are rare along the coasts where my base is (East Central Coast). The high level Scorpion also found up at higher elevations, possesses the venom for effective torpor.

So I picked the north central mountain on TheIsland map (default ARK map), not the one on the North Coast, but in the north central section of the island and started with a modest taming station, a structure designed to hang up the prey so it can be shot with a tranquilizer. Note, I’m pretending to talk to people who don’t know much about ARK.

Then I thought, mountains tops are the place where Giganotosaurus spawn and I want one of those too!

For Giga hunting, unless you can find the most perfect setup, since you can't shoot while riding a dino, you have to dismount, shoot, and then get back on your bird and fly before being chomped. I've done the run around the rock frantically game, with a Spinosaurus and TRex, but this thing is too freak'n big, and scary I might add. So I decided to make a taming station large enough to hold one, one of the perks of playing in creative mode (solo game with admin privileges), you don't sweat producing the building materials. Instead of investing a couple hundred hours of collecting the materials I needed, I was able to throw up a huge taming station fairly quickly (couple of evenings).

I've been spoiled playing on a server with the difficulty offset at 4.0 (the default is 1.0), so I'm used to seeing Level 250 dinos. I changed that setting on my solo game, and used the 'Admincheat DestroyWildDinos' command to kill off all the wild dinos and allow higher level dinos to spawn, not L250, but higher. When I found a L100 Argen, I was ecstatic and while riding my low level (25) bird, lured it to my taming station where I subdued it and tamed it to a L160 Argen, yeah baby!

About that time, a large Giga came rumbling over a far side of the mountain, not next to me, but where I could see it.. Well, they are all "large", but this one was a L100, OMG, I wanted it badly. I tried to lure it back to my taming pen, by attacking on my bird, while avoiding being chomped, which did not hold it's attention. I managed to find a spot suitable to shoot at it, but it decided to run down the hill into thick woods, not a good place for hunting and surviving.

So I flew over the forest looking for it. On the south side of this forest was a cliff, a ravine, and on the other side a plateau. I could see the Giga in the forest tromping around close to the cliff. I flew to the plateau, with the ravine between me and the giga and fired a couple of tranq darts. I think they hit, but it did not come charging at me as I thought it would. Instead it slowly rotated around as if it was stuck. That’s very interesting because something TRex or bigger usually just busts through any trees in it’s way. I got up enough nerve to fly over to it to see if it would lunge. Nope. Then I landed along the cliff about 100’ from it. It did not charge. Then I took aim, fired, and the round was a definite hit, but the Giga did not budge. Was I lucky to have this thing hung up in trees and rocks, or what? Consider, the latest version of ARK makes the dinos smart enough to run away when losing a fight. It was incredible that my Giga was stuck and could not run away nor lunge and eat me!!

​

So from about 100’ away, I started firing in earnest. I made some mistakes which prolonged the process. First of all, I had been used to using a crossbow with tranq arrows and the technique was to make a shot about every 10 seconds so each tranq shot would have full effect. They are not supposed to stack, but in this instance, I was using a long rifle with tranq darts. More on this later.

After about firing about 300 hundred darts into it and it was still standing, I decided to put the game on pause (one of the luxuries of a solo game) and looked up Giga taming tips. It advised me that the developers had set the game up, I guess for PVP, so that a head shot is more effective. Maybe so, with bullets (if they penetrate), but I questioned shooting darts at the bony skull of this predator and had been shooting darts into the logical fleshy parts of the animal.

Programing rules, so I started anew shooting it in the head for about another 200 darts. Finally after an hour or so, it was getting late so I decided to call it a night, and saved the game to be continued the next day (another luxury of the solo game).

Later, I spoke with a guild mate who advised me that Giga’s have so much torper that must be introduced, when using a long rifle and tranq dart, you had to fire that sucker as fast as you could and by his questimate, it should take about 450 darts. My mistake number 2.

I’ll take a moment to point out how lucky I was in several ways, to be just in the right place during this tame, not to be attacked by random roving dinos. I was on the edge of a cliff on the edge of a dense forest, and maybe the presence of a Giga was incentive for the normal dinos to avoid the area? Probably just luck and not programming, because when riding the Giga around, animals don’t run in terror, and usually become its hors d'oeuvres.

Being lucky part two- I got complacent during the tame, and strayed a little too close. A single chomp in the air in my close proximity almost killed me, accompanied by that awful your about to die noise as your health rebuilds.

The next day I started fresh with the taming routine, trying to knock this brute down, having no idea how much torpor this beast had remaining from the previous session. I picked up my trusty long rifle and started shooting as fast as I could. If you make a hit, you can see a red bloom on the dino (darts have read feathers), and the dino mostly makes a “GRR” I’m going to kill you noise, but sometimes it would really jump and roar. What is very annoying is when you zoom to first person view, you have a clear shot, but your dart ends up embedded in the tree next to you, something to be aware of with the visual aiming in this game.

When all was said and done, I had pumped about 700 darts, including those from the previous day) into my pet candidate before it finally collapsed. It’s frustrating is that you are provided no clues it’s state of torpor, so until it drops you have no idea how close you are. You can imaging how tense it gets as you get low on darts/tranq arrows.

Fortunately I had it’s favorite kibble and had set timing speed to fast (another perk of having admin privileges) and it took about 30 minutes to tame (taming x20). Something I noticed with the Giga, that I've not seen before. Alarmingly this Giga had 78000 torpor, it drops at 50% torpor (39k), and I all most crapped myself when I got to it within a minute, looked at it's stats, and it's torpor had all ready plummeted, into the low 20s. Yikes! I immediately pumped it with 200 narco, probably added another 200 narco. There is no beating around the bush with this to keep the beast asleep. I've also been told that if you overdue it, and take it above 80% it can also wake up. I think to do this, you'd have to pump in 5-600 narco upfront, which would be bad. A good technique seemed to be add 200 Narco, and watch the torpor climb. When it hit's it's high point, then make a decision about how much more to add.

When a dino is tamed, if the owner is present, it will go into follow mode, which it did. But when I moved, it stayed put. It really was stuck. So I equipped it with a saddle and mounted the beast name- “Rumble I.T. Jungle”, but could not initially get it to move. Finally something I did worked, attack a tree or something and it lunged, and …fell off the cliff. If you are not familiar with Gigas they have this annoying habit of becoming enraged, especially when they take fall damage, and… eating their rider. Yep, CHOMP, and I was dead, lol.

Fortunately, I had a bed nearby to respawn at my taming station. I did not even get dressed, but jumped on my alternate bird in my undies, and flew back to retrieve my new pet. I could all most sensed an apologetic look on it’s face as in sorry about that…

Now that I’ve actually taken one out on several excursions on the mountain, I’ve learned to be VERY careful about allowing Rumble to slip and fall. It happened once, and it’s eyes turned red, threw me off, but somehow, I was not eaten. It’s hard to complain when you are riding a dino with thirty thousand health, when you are used to owning dinos that start off at 200 health, even if it does eat you on occasion.

One other event on my Giga- While out and about on the mountain, I saw another Giga roaming. It was only a L60, and I was on a L160, so no contest right? I flew back to my mountain station to fetch Rumble, and marched forward into battle. Well I died. Somewhere during the fight, Rumble became enraged, threw me, and I’m no sure which one it was, but I was eaten again. When I flew back to the fight seen, the other Giga was gone, I presume it was killed, because Rumble was at half health and bloody. Since then, I’ve been thinking about a good technique for dealing with killing another Giga while riding a Giga. Maybe it would be best to engage in battle, then dismount and run away while the two animals duke it out? Hmm, let the adventure continue!

macrumors demi-god

Posted this at Steam today.
Running Multiple Maps in ARK, Caution Loss of Solo Progress Possible
This applies to solo game play...
Recently I tried out a new map by subscribing to it in the workshop, which downloaded it. Launched it, and on the starting page, two maps were now listed. I select the new map, the game required that I create a new character, I checked it out (the new map) and decided it was not for me.

The surprise was when I returned to the default map-TheIsland, my character, representing over a hundred hours of game time was no where to be found. Fortunately, I had backup saves of my game I had manually created and was able to recover my original character, including progress.

Look in the ARK>ShooterGame folder>Saved folder>SavedArksLocal folder. (This is described for the Windows version. For Mac, it's probably located in the Library>Application Support, but obviously, I've not verified that. ) There will be TheIsland map file, probably a series of backup map files with dates included in the names, indicating previous saves, and two LocalPlayer files. These I believe are where your character progress is saved, and apparantly they don't allow for storing the progress of two characters in the solo game. For backup, it's easiest just to back up the entire 'Saved' folder.

I don't think a Steam cloud save would help...

Unless it's operator error or ignorance, it seems that the Devs need to fix this. I imagine most players don't want to have 100s of hours of solo game progress lost because they wanted to look at a new map

Posted this at Steam today.
Running Multiple Maps in ARK, Caution Loss of Solo Progress Possible
This applies to solo game play...
Recently I tried out a new map by subscribing to it in the workshop, which downloaded it. Launched it, and on the starting page, two maps were now listed. I select the new map, the game required that I create a new character, I checked it out (the new map) and decided it was not for me.

The surprise was when I returned to the default map-TheIsland, my character, representing over a hundred hours of game time was no where to be found. Fortunately, I had backup saves of my game I had manually created and was able to recover my original character, including progress.

Look in the ARK>ShooterGame folder>Saved folder>SavedArksLocal folder. (This is described for the Windows version. For Mac, it's probably located in the Library>Application Support, but obviously, I've not verified that. ) There will be TheIsland map file, probably a series of backup map files with dates included in the names, indicating previous saves, and two LocalPlayer files. These I believe are where your character progress is saved, and apparantly they don't allow for storing the progress of two characters in the solo game. For backup, it's easiest just to back up the entire 'Saved' folder.

I don't think a Steam cloud save would help...

Unless it's operator error or ignorance, it seems that the Devs need to fix this. I imagine most players don't want to have 100s of hours of solo game progress lost because they wanted to look at a new map

This seems to be corrected. You can maintain a seperate solo game on the original The Island map and the new official Center Map. I always recommend saving copies of your solo game. I don't know how I would go about ressurecting a game from Stream cloud. My extra saves are kept locally.

macrumors demi-god

The Leach Check SOP: After each animal use- For working with multiple animals, or animals without saddles in Primitive Plus.

Before today I was unaware of leaches. I lost one of my partner-in-crime's L200 Allosaurus when a leach unknown to me became attached and killed it overnight. If you walk up to an animal and hit "E", I believe an infected animal will display a message asking to remove Leach. I was not aware, because this animal was being used without a saddle, otherwise you'd notice it when you tried to get on it.

When you are out working with animals and checking their damage, a leach may not be noticeable, I had them out for over an hour and did several damage checks while force feeding to bring their health back up to full. They all looked normal, but it is something that can kill in about 12 hours or less if you are unaware. So leach checks must be standard procedure after each animal usage.

Question- Anyone know if leaches can be found in any body of water including rivers? I assume there might be more of them in the swamp.

macrumors demi-god

Taming Pen Warning (Aug 2016)- This may have been an issue all along, but I built a large Taming Pen that should be secure. I lured two animals into it and shut the door. I left the pen and returned to my base to retrieve some arrows and when I returned both of the animals were out of the pen. Based on discussing the issue with other players more knowledgeable than I, I suspect this is a glitch in the game. The essence of the glitch is when you leave an area and then return, the game redraws the scene and unfortunately draws the animals before built structures. So if you have an animal trying to escape a pen, you may discover that has happened when you return to the pen. Until this is corrected, if ever, the solution is to not trap any animals in a taming pen until you have all you need to commence training. Option Two is to keep a stocked cabinet at the training site with arrows and narco.

macrumors demi-god

Primitive Plus- Official DLC adds a new level of crafting complexity, while taking away some things that really make no sense. I'd describe it as a mixed bag, brick looks great compared to stone, but now I have to mix up fresh cement and have a limited time to make brick walls.

We are now primitive, right? So no electricity, no fabricators, no fridges, but we have other primitive workbenches and devices like preserving cabinets, that do the same things. And instead of a camp fire, and an industrial cooker, we now have a fire, oven, and primative grill.

My primary critique is that metal walls, foundations, etc the best defense against large aggressive dinos is gone, but we now have oh-so primative steel pillars? And brick for some reason is impenetrable to a Dino attack (unrealistic) but we have now have to rely on stone foundations for building defenses? As you may know, in the classic game, a defensive wall is only as good as it's foundation, and although you can place brick on a stone foundation, do you really have a Dino proof wall, because stone can be damaged by Alphas and Gigantosauruses?

macrumors demi-god

Besides being a good rule to always back up your saves, if solo you are playing both a classic game and a Primitive Plus game, be super careful that you remember to check which game type you want to load, before you launch a particular solo game.

When ARK is first started, there is a selection on a tab lower right of main screen to select "none" or "Primitive Plus". For whatever reason, the game does not recognize what kind of game you are loading and if you for example launch a classic game, but have "Primitive Plus" selected on the main screen (or vice a versa), there is no warning! It will launch and convert the map over to the selected type, and royally mess your solo game by removing all of the conflicting infrastructure you've built.

I've not yet tried to see if you can recover from such an error for an advanced game. However, the one time I tried to change a fairly new classic game over to PP, all the classic items were removed, and when I tried to go back, I ended up spawning inside a rock, and my Pteradon was gone, maybe also stuck in the rock. Anyway it was messed up my game up and the fix was restoring a backed up game save.

macrumors demi-god

If you are experiencing sluggish experience in ARK on a server and have 8GB of RAM, the problem may be solved by increasing RAM. On my PC, (see my signature) hesitation and stalling on a server mostly has gone away since I increased my RAM to 24GB.

macrumors demi-god

Yes, they added this feature to at least Griffins! How’s that for reviving a thread?

April 2018 back into ARK: Survival Evolved. Some outstanding mods for this game. Some building oriented, Automated Ark, Structures +, Castles and Keeps, Steam Punk, and stacking Mods. Some game play oriented, Pugnacia Dinos and Immersive Taming which is a lot of fun. No need to stand over an inert dino’s body for hours, feeding it to make it your friend.

macrumors G3

Yes, they added this feature to at least Griffins! How’s that for reviving a thread?

April 2018 back into ARK: Survival Evolved. Some outstanding mods for this game. Some building oriented, Automated Ark, Structures +, Castles and Keeps, Steam Punk, and stacking Mods. Some game play oriented, Pugnacia Dinos and Immersive Taming which is a lot of fun. No need to stand over an inert dino’s body for hours, feeding it to make it your friend.

macrumors demi-god

Regarding the google drive link on post 1, I removed the guide from my google drive, but if anyone wants to see it, to play the game, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I have an RTF file, but the problem I ran into was, when I copied it into a forum post, imbedded links did not transfer.

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